You are here:

Fuminori Nakamura

Biography

Fuminori Nakamura

Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He won the 2002 Shinchō Literary Prize for New Writers for his first novel, THE GUN, the prestigious Noma Literary Prize for SHADE in 2004, and the 2005 Akutagawa Prize for THE BOY IN THE EARTH. THE THIEF, his first novel to be translated into English, won the 2010 Oe Prize, Japan’s largest literary award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the recipient of NoirCon’s David L. Goodis Award and currently lives in Tokyo with his wife.

Fuminori Nakamura

Books by Fuminori Nakamura

When Toru Narazaki’s girlfriend, Ryoko Tachibana, disappears, he tries to track her down, despite the warnings of the private detective he’s hired to find her. Ryoko’s past is shrouded in mystery, but the one concrete clue to her whereabouts is a previous address in the heart of Tokyo. She lived in a compound with a group that seems to be a cult led by a charismatic guru with a revisionist Buddhist scheme of life, death and society. Narazaki plunges into the secretive world of the cult, ready to expose himself to any of the guru’s brainwashing tactics if it means he can learn the truth about Ryoko. But the cult isn’t what he expected, and he has no idea of the bubbling violence he is stepping into.

As an unnamed Tokyo taxi driver works a night shift, picking up fares that offer him glimpses into the lives of ordinary people, he can’t escape his own nihilistic thoughts. Almost without meaning to, he puts himself in harm’s way; he can’t stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in obsessive fantasies that soon become terrifying blackout episodes. The truth is, his long-estranged father has tried to reach out to him, triggering a cascade of traumatic memories. As the cab driver wrestles with the truth about his past and the history of violence in his childhood, he also must confront his present, which is no less complicated or grim.

Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She operates alone and lives a private, solitary life, doing her best to lock away painful memories. But when a figure from Yurika’s past resurfaces, she realizes there is someone out there who knows all her secrets. There are whispers of a crime lord named Kizaki, and Yurika finds herself trapped in a game of cat and mouse.

On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon his personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated. Through it all, he can’t stop thinking about the gun --- and the four bullets loaded in its chamber. As he spirals into obsession, his focus is consumed by one idea: that possessing the gun is no longer enough --- he must fire it.

A young writer is assigned a difficult task by his editor: he is to write an investigative biography of a death row inmate named Yudai Kiharazaka, a 35-year-old photographer who has been convicted of the murders of two women. Trying to unearth the truth about Kiharazaka forces the writer to grapple with horrifying archival material and to interview dangerous, grotesque people --- not least of all Kiharazaka himself.

In Fumihiro Kuki’s wealthy family, it’s tradition that a patriarch, when reaching the end of his life, will beget one last child to dedicate to causing misery in a world that cannot be controlled or saved. Eleven-year-old Fumihiro will be specially educated to learn to create as much destruction and unhappiness in the world around him as a single person can. But as his education progresses, he begins to question his father's mandate.

He has no family, no friends, no connections. But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers him a job. Only the day after the job does he learn that the old man he tied up was a prominent politician, and that he was brutally killed after the robbery.

Find an Author

We Are...

A site for 20Something readers. To us, 20Something is “A decade. A state of mind. An age. A lifestyle. A time for self-discovery. A new perspective. An attitude. A philosophy. Independence. Freedom. A time to rediscover reading for pleasure --- and finally, read what you want.”